Forge of Mars - Graham McNeill

by Warhammer 40K

  Such a state of being was untenable on a fundamental level, and the resultant release of energy was catastrophic for the vast majority of objects hit by such a weapon. Though on the periphery of the streaming waves of chronometric energy, the Starblade’s solar mast detonated as though its internal structure had been threaded with explosive charges. The sail tore free of the ship, ghost images of its previous existence flickering as the psycho-conductive wraithbone screamed in its death throes. Blue flame geysered from the topside of the eldar vessel and the craft lurched away from the force of the blast.

  Its previously distorted and fragmentary outline became solid, and the circling captains of the Kotov Fleet wasted no time in loosing salvo after salvo of torpedoes at the newly revealed warship.

  Mortis Voss let fly first, with a thirty-strong battery of warheads aimed in a spreading net that would make escape virtually impossible. Wrathchild and Moonchild followed, firing bracketing spreads of torpedoes before both vessels heeled over to present their flank batteries of lances. Stabbing beams of high energy blazed at the Starblade and had this engagement been fought in open space, the eldar vessel would have been reduced to a rapidly expanding bloom of shattered wraithbone, combusting oxygen and white-hot debris.

  The gravitational vagaries of the Halo Scar made for an unforgiving battleground and only a handful of torpedoes punched through its starboard hull to tear out great chunks of its guts in raging firestorms of detonation.

  Even with the clarity provided by the roused machine heart of the Speranza it was impossible to tell what, if anything, had survived the storm of lances, torpedoes and the crushing power of the temporary black hole. It was collapsing in on itself in a cannibalistic storm of self-immolation, and by the time its raging furies had faded into the background radiation of the Scar, there was nothing to indicate the presence of the Starblade.

  Every shipmaster knew the eldar ship had likely survived the punishing assault, but their decks echoed with the cheers of jubilant ratings, many of whom had not expected to live through the battle. The electromagnetic hash of the void engagement would remain lousy with spikes of dirty radiation for years to come, painting a vivid picture of the battle for anyone that cared to look.

  The chrono-weapon lowered from its firing position with majestic grace until it was once again flush and secure within the body of the Speranza, invisible and indistinguishable from the surrounding superstructure, no doubt as its builders had intended.

  The Starblade was still out there somewhere, but for now its threat had been neutralised, its boarders repelled and its captain given a valuable lesson in humility.

  And with its retreat, the Kotov Fleet pressed on.

  In the end it took another six days of sailing and the loss of seven other vessels before the forward element of Archmagos Kotov’s Explorator Fleet finally breached the gravitational boundaries of the Halo Scar. One refinery vessel was lost when its astrogation consoles developed a fractional degree of separation from its designated datum point and it ended up drifting from the safe corridor assigned to it.

  A binary neutron star cluster caught the ship in its divergent gravity waves and broke it in two. Its death was mercifully swift after that, both halves crushed and dragged in to add their steel and flesh and bone to the spiteful mass of the dead stars. Two emptied fuel carriers suffered engine failure and were pulled out of their trajectories before the frantic Mechanicus enginseers could relight their plasma cores.

  Of the other four, a forge-ship, a solar collector and two fabricatus silo-ships, nothing was known. Their shipmasters simply ceased their positional reports and no attempt to raise them or pinpoint their co-ordinates could locate them. The Halo Scar had swallowed them as surely as though they had been blown apart by the eldar warship.

  Mortis Voss was the first ship to register the normalising gravity fields and return its forward auspex and surveyor gear back to nominal levels. There was no clearly defined moment of emergence, simply a gradual lessening of aberrant gravity and light distortion as the worst of the corpse-stars were left behind and the last scion of the Voss Prime forge world sailed through the scattered clouds of stellar gas and dust that blurred the edge of the Scar.

  Its mater-captain halted the vessel as soon as she was able, and began a detailed surveyor scan of the wilderness space that surrounded it. What it revealed was somewhat less than the spectacularly different vista that had perhaps been expected, but no less terrible for its very familiarity.

  Over the next day, more and more ships limped from the depths of the Halo Scar; battered, twisted and damaged, but triumphant at having navigated a region of space that had claimed so many other souls.

  The Speranza emerged two days after Mortis Voss, and gratefully inloaded the spatial data accumulated by the lesser ship’s mater-captain. Deep in the astrogation chamber, the Magos Tychons filled their days building a picture of the discovered space that lay before them; its unknown suns, its vast gulfs and the blinding swathe of ruddy light from the ageing red giant at the heart of the dying star system that lay before the Speranza.

  The doomed system had been almost completely overrun by the runaway nuclear reactions at the heart of the star. If any inner planets had once existed they were long dead, swallowed by the star’s expanding corona, and the last remaining world of the system was a solitary pale orb that hung like a glittering diamond at the farthest extent of the star’s gravitational reach.

  Under normal circumstances, any star in its death throes would be avoided as a matter of course, the space within the system too volatile and too thick with ejected matter and radiation to be worth the risk of venturing too close.

  Yet it was towards this last surviving world that Roboute Surcouf led the Kotov Fleet.

  Roboute watched the seething haze of the bloated red giant with a measure of awed respect and sadness. This star had birthed itself ten billion years ago, but it had now exhausted its sustaining fuel and its span of life was at an end. In its impossibly vast existence it had known many guises, shone in varied spectra and provided light and warmth to the vanished planets that had once orbited its life-giving rays.

  It might once have been worshipped, it might have had many names in its long life, but now it was simply a dying relic from a time when the galaxy was still young and stumbling though its earliest stages of stellar evolution. Archmagos Kotov had named it Arcturus Ultra, a name that struck Roboute as appropriate in several ways.

  He sat in the raised plug-chair next to Kotov’s throne, connected to the Speranza’s noospheric network via the spinal plugs, and followed the course trajectories plotted by Magos Azuramagelli. They intercepted the orbit of the last planet of the Arcturus Ultra system, a world that had thus far survived the star’s expanding death throes by virtue of having its orbit thrown out by the stellar reactions that would soon destroy it. Roboute had been granted the honour of giving this world an identifier, and had chosen to name it after something beautiful that was lost to him.

  He called it Katen Venia, and it was this world that the memory wafer he had at last handed to Archmagos Kotov had identified as their destination. With their emergence from the Halo Scar, Roboute had honoured his agreement with the archmagos and made his way directly to the command deck of the Speranza.

  He had solemnly offered the memory wafer to Kotov, who took a moment to savour the sensation of handling its gold-embossed surfaces with his machined hands before slotting it home in the shell-like casing of the locator beacon he kept mounted on the back of his command throne. The inloaded astrogation data immediately synchronised with the local stellar configuration and the location of the craft from which it had been ejected was swiftly picked up on the last remaining world of the Arcturus Ultra system.

  Advance servitor-probes fired into the outer reaches of the system had provided a more detailed rendering of Katen Venia, its surface a crystalline wasteland of silica peaks and exotic par
ticle radiations. A faint, but unmistakably Imperial signal was being broadcast from the jagged haunches of a cut-crystal range of mountains, from what was assumed to be the wreck of the Tomioka, Magos Telok’s lost flagship.

  Magos Azuramagelli and Magos Blaylock had wasted no time in plotting the optimal course towards the source of the signal, and despite the losses suffered crossing the Halo Scar, the mood of the assembled magi grew optimistic. The planet was still ten days distant, but seemed so close that they could just reach out and pluck its diamond brilliance from the heavens like a jewel of radiant light.

  ‘Fitting that we should find new beginnings in a place of endings,’ said Kotov, calling the swirling ball of light towards him.

  In honour of their arrival on the far side of the Halo Scar and venturing into the unknown space beyond the known reaches of the Imperium, Archmagos Kotov had chosen to attach his cranium to a more regal body than his warrior aspect. This automaton body was robed and gilded in precious metals, shimmering gemstones and binaric prayer strips. A heavy cloak of silver mail fell in cascading waves of hexamathic geometries, and while he carried no obvious armaments, there was no doubting that the trio of flexing servo-arms, with their collection of clamps, drills and pincers, could be wielded as weapons.

  ‘How much longer will that star last before it explodes?’ asked Roboute.

  ‘Judging by its radiation output and the composition of the ejected matter, perhaps another few million years,’ said Kotov.

  Roboute nodded. He hadn’t really felt as though the star was in danger of catching them unawares with a sudden supernova event, but the strangeness and hostile nature of its current incarnation made him wary of the unseen reactions taking place in its core.

  ‘I can barely even think of those kinds of spans,’ he said. ‘It’s enough time for entire races to spring into being, countless stellar empires to rise and fall, and dozens of periods of species extinction.’

  ‘The human mind is virtually incapable of visualising such colossal spans of time relative to its own infinitesimal existence,’ said Galatea. ‘It makes events such as this seem almost static, when the reality could not be more energetic.’

  Roboute stared at the machine that hunkered down in the centre of the command deck like a grotesque ambush predator settling into its new lair. Kotov had explained the nature of the gestalt creature to him, but Roboute had the sense there was as much left unsaid as had been explained.

  The magi on the command deck were deathly afraid of it, that much was obvious, and given the ease with which it had inveigled itself onto the Speranza, he suspected there was good reason for that fear. None of that mattered to Roboute. Once he had led Kotov to Katen Venia, there was nothing left to bind him to the cause of the Adeptus Mechanicus.

  He was free and clear of the Imperium, a servant to no man and limited only by his own sense of discovery and imagination. It took all his willpower to remain seated and not rush down to the Renard and fly off in the direction of the nearest habitable system and see what was out there.

  Second star on the right, and straight on till morning...

  Abrehem awoke to the sound of ratcheting machinery and the stink of hot metal. He was lying on his back on an uncomfortable metal gurney, somewhere with a ceiling tiled in bottle-green ceramic. The smell of counterseptic and drifting incense was powerful, and he tasted the unpleasant tang of overcooked meat and burnt hair from somewhere nearby. He blinked, and his eyes registered a number of binaric locators etched into the walls.

  ‘Ah, you are awake,’ said a voice, metallic and muffled by a voluminous hood.

  Abrehem tried to sit up, but his limbs were not his to control.

  ‘Why can’t I move?’ he said, not yet alarmed by this turn of events.

  ‘You are still feeling the effects of the muscle relaxants and motion-dampers,’ said the voice. ‘It’s quite normal to feel a little disorientation after surgery.’

  ‘Surgery? What surgery?’

  ‘How much do you remember of the eldar attack?’

  The last thing he remembered was the horrific pain of...

  ‘My arm!’ he gasped, attempting to turn and look at his arm. His head wouldn’t move, but at the farthest extent of his vision he could see a pair of medicae servitors bending over his shoulder and a number of floating surgical servo-skulls with darting suture-calipers and nerve-graft lasers.

  ‘Don’t worry, the surgery was a complete success,’ said the voice.

  ‘What did you do to me?’ cried Abrehem. ‘You’re not turning me into a servitor, are you?’

  ‘A servitor? Ave Deus Mechanicus, no!’

  ‘Then what are you doing?’

  ‘Fixing you,’ said the speaker, and now the owner of the voice leaned over Abrehem as the servo-skulls floated away. The medicae servitors gathered up their equipment and a number of kidney bowls filled with what looked like lumps of blackened, overcooked meat.

  ‘Was that my arm?’ asked Abrehem.

  ‘It was,’ said the hooded adept, and Abrehem recognised him as the overseer, Totha Mu-32. ‘It was far beyond saving, and will be disposed of with the rest of the biological material lost in the attack.’

  ‘Imperator,’ gasped Abrehem, fighting to control his breathing. ‘My arm...’

  Totha Mu-32’s blank silver mask and pale blue optics managed to register surprise.

  ‘Ah, of course,’ he said, bending to a gurgling machine that Abrehem couldn’t quite see. A hissing pump mechanism engaged and a crackling hum of power that Abrehem had taken for the background noise of the room fell silent.

  Warmth and feeling returned to Abrehem’s limbs almost immediately, and he flexed his fingers, enjoying the sensation of movement until he realised something didn’t make sense.

  He was flexing the fingers of both his hands.

  He sat up sharply, feeling a brief moment of nausea as the lingering effects of the drugs he had been given sloshed around his bloodstream. He sat on a surgical slab in a green-tiled medicae bay with banks of silver workbenches, mortuary compartments and suspended machinery with enough blades, drills and clamps to look like excruciation engines.

  ‘I have a new arm,’ he said.

  His right arm was fashioned from dark metal, with a bronze cowling at the junction of flesh and machine. The fingers were segmented bronze, and the elbow a spherical gimbal that allowed for three hundred and sixty degrees of rotation. Abrehem flexed the fingers, finding them slightly slower to respond than their flesh and blood counterparts, but still able to articulate in every way that mattered.

  ‘It is not a sophisticated augmetic, but it was the best I could do, I’m afraid,’ said Totha Mu-32.

  ‘You arranged this?’ asked Abrehem. ‘Why?’

  Totha Mu-32 chuckled. ‘You really don’t remember, do you?’

  ‘Remember what?’

  ‘Killing the eldar war-leader?’

  ‘I remember shooting him with Haw... I mean, with that plasma pistol.’

  Totha Mu-32 waved away the question of the weapon’s ownership and said, ‘Exactly. That weapon was six hundred years old and its power cell didn’t have so much as a pico-joule left in it. And its plasma coil had corroded so badly that it should never have fired at all.’

  ‘I don’t understand,’ said Abrehem. ‘What are you saying?’

  Totha Mu-32 leaned forwards, his voice dropping to a conspiratorial whisper. ‘I am saying that they are right about you, Abrehem Locke. You are Machine-touched. The Omnissiah watches over you and a spark of his divine fire moves within you.’

  ‘No,’ said Abrehem, shaking his head. ‘You’re wrong. I don’t know how that pistol fired, but it was nothing to do with me. It was an accident, a fluke.’

  ‘Then how do you explain that?’ said Totha Mu-32, pointing over Abrehem’s shoulder.

  Abrehem turned and saw the iron-mask
ed killer who had carved up the eldar warriors in the time it took to blink. His physique had returned to something approaching normal, though he was still vastly muscled and insanely powerful looking. He had been clothed in a black vest and a pair of grey fatigues, and wore heavy iron-shod boots. The writhing silver flails were retracted into his bronze gauntlets, making him look as though he had slender claws for hands.

  The red Icon Mechanicus on his forehead was like a burning third eye, and he bared gleaming fangs as he sensed Abrehem’s gaze.

  ‘By your leave,’ he growled, bowing his metal-encased head.

  ‘What is it?’ asked Abrehem, feeling a lethal sense of hair-trigger danger from the biological death machine.

  ‘An arco-flagellant,’ said Totha Mu-32. ‘Your arco-flagellant.’

  Booming hymnals in praise of the Omnissiah in his aspect of the Life Giver echoed from the forge-temple of Magos Turentek as the heavy piston cranes angled the reclining fabricator cradle from horizontal to vertical in a necessarily slow arc. The Ark Fabricatus himself, a hardwired collection of assembly equipment, dangling construction arms, lifter gear and a cab from which his biological components could oversee the work in his many forges, moved across the ceiling rails at a pace that matched the ascent of the fabricator cradle.

  To have achieved so much in so short a time was nothing short of miraculous, and the deafening hymns and cascades of binary were prayers of thanks to the Machine-God for facilitating the work he had done here. On any vessel other than the Speranza, the task would have been impossible, but not only had Turentek achieved the impossible, he had done it ahead of schedule.

  Sheets of tarpaulin like the sails of ocean-going ships fell from the cradle and mooring lines were blasted clear with pneumatic pressure. Vats of blessed oils and lubricants upended over the enormous cradle and a baptismal rain coated the renewed carapace of heavy armour and a warrior restored to his former glory.